In The Trenches Video Series
How to prevent catalytic converter theft
In this episode physical security experts go over 3 solutions to help stop catalytic converter theft. Catalytic converter theft is up as much as 10,000% (yes, ten thousand) in some areas from just a decade ago and it's continuing to spread across the country.
Our speakers today are:
- > Benjamin Larue
- > James Campbell
James Campbell:
People literally run when they hear themselves being called out. And it is really effective because they are being watched. This has all been done in the shadows, it's all been done in front of cameras that don't have any active deterrence, certainly don't have any remote guarding capability like we can do. And because of that, it's been, I want to say easy. It's been easy for people to steal Cataly converters. That's why it's so popular.
Ben Larue:
Welcome to the first ever Problem versus solution episode. This is a new series that we're launching here at S E W to specifically dive into some of the problems, most common problems we see our clients facing, and then really the solutions that we typically propose to help try to solve that problem. And so you're going to see a variety of different casts in these series of episodes, but really it's going to be a conversation around problem that we know our industry faces and then some solutions that we propose to help solve that. In today's episode specifically, I've got James, he's our head of product here at S E w. How you doing James?
James Campbell:
Good, right? Excited to get going.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. So today's episode, we thought there would be no better way to kick off this new series of ours than talking about the hottest topic in this space without a doubt. And that is catalytic converter effect.
James Campbell:
Yeah, it is the topic everyone's concerned about. It's all in the news. I think it's literally like 700 or 7000% higher catalytic and converter thefts compared to like 2010 or something like that. It's just gone through the roof and everyone's concerned about it and everyone honestly should be so,
Ben Larue:
Right. Yeah, I mean I think everyone should be concerned about it too because it can happen so fast, right? We're coming to find out that these criminals, these people that are doing this, they're doing it very intentionally. They know exactly where to go to find these catalytic converters and how to cut them off very quickly, right?
James Campbell:
Yeah. They're professionals now. It was in 2010, it was just some dude and he is going through it now. It's like you got organization with it and it's just like you said, clean job, they're in and they're out. And the damage that causes, I think can be extremely high. Not just a cata converter theft. And we talk about this a lot in this series, but the actual damage that it could occur, you're a landscaping company. What happens if you don't? You come into your job and you realize that all your trucks lost their cats overnight. You're going to have a rough couple days and a rough couple of weeks probably with dealing with clients and delays and all that kind of stuff. And that's why it's such a big topic, losing cataly converter not fun. And that costs money, costs insurance and time and everything, but the real cost is what it's going to do to your business if you can't roll trucks. Oh,
Ben Larue:
I mean, exactly. And so I think it could be helpful too to quickly define when we are talking about catalytic converters thefts, we're talking about the theft of a catalytic converter, which is a part of the muffler system of a vehicle, and they're stealing it because of the copper that's inside of this catalytic converter,
James Campbell:
Some other bare metals and all that kind of stuff. Yeah,
Ben Larue:
Exactly.
James Campbell:
Huge black market for
Ben Larue:
Huge black market for it. And we're seeing this happen on commercial vehicles. And to your point about the landscaping company, the vehicle that carries around all the lawnmowers and stuff, that might be a specialty park that Cata lake converter might be hard to source that might put that truck out of service for a little while.
James Campbell:
But yeah, I think with pallet converters, it doesn't have to be a specialty part. It could take weeks and weeks to actually get that thing back up and running. So I think this is like, I don't know how many times we get this even daily, this is definitely a daily question if not multiple times a day. And I think lead right into the solutions. I think we typically talk about, I think the first one, first thing I usually think of is what physical barriers do you have? Right?
Ben Larue:
Exactly. And that's often some of the first questions that our team on the consulting side will ask when clients bring these problems is were these vehicles parked? How are they parked? Are they stored? Yeah. Do you have a fence? It's often one of the first questions that we're trying to unpack because part of the solution is kind of having this layered approach to security. Yeah,
James Campbell:
It's not any one product that's going to solve this. There are some specific, I know we've talked, and I think with jumping right into physical barriers, what that is, we're talking about fencing, we're talking about really fencing is probably the number one thing, right? Because
Ben Larue:
The
James Campbell:
More difficult you are to approach it, there's so many targets out there. This is one of those things. We have millions and millions and hundreds of millions of vehicles in this country. And if you're a more difficult target, less likely to potentially be for them to go after, why go after a hard target when they've got soft targets everywhere? Right? Now that being said, I know there are a certain situation where you can't use physical barriers either. I know a lot of car dealerships, they can't do that because they want this to be open, they want it to be inviting and everything like that. And there's plenty of places where it's not physically possible to put up fencing and put up a gate or any of these other things that can really help. But it is the first thing we kind of ask about because that kind of figures they are getting around fencing anything and fencing buys time. I guess it's not the only thing that can fix it. And I think that's true for any problem of course though.
Ben Larue:
Exactly. And I was just going to say that, right? It's that we shouldn't necessarily be looking at these physical barriers as things that, oh, if I put this in place, it's going to solve the problem. We spoke to that layered security type of approach a minute ago, and we've had clients call in talking about catalytic convert theft where the person cut through the fence. And so that alone is not stopping us. But other examples of physical barriers could be very high end and fancy perimeter intrusion detection systems, hids as they're called sometimes, right? Like sonar and radar types of, and I mean you're talking in the tens of thousands, but that's an example of a physical barrier. I think they even make little devices. James, we maybe look in
James Campbell:
I was going to reference those. Yeah, I know actually you put 'em into the cats and then they can kind of tell from there. I don't know if that's, you'd have to look into that in terms of, I don't know if that's a good solution for something that moves every day kind of thing, or if it's more for
Car loss and stuff where they can take it off before and all that kind of stuff. And we heard mixed things about that, to be honest, in terms of the effectiveness of it. And like you said, one of the other ones when we were talking about physical, this isn't necessarily a barrier, but lighting, if your parking lot's well lit and people can kind of see what's going on over there and hopefully happens to be in your parking lot, sees that somebody is going behind a car and they call the police if it's dark over there, that makes them a lot more likely to want to go over there because they know they're going to be less seen from the road or the parking lot. That's another major thing there that you can do improve your lighting at your facility. And that's going to do a lot of things. Like I said, active is a little bit of a turn, but also improve the performance of your cameras, which I know we'll talk about at some point too.
Ben Larue:
Well, I was just going to say is that I think you just hit the nail on the head Personally, I think security lighting and just general really good ambient lighting is the most underrated physical barrier that we have in our space. It's something often never even really considered, but a very powerful tool in humping back as a parent. Absolutely. And like you said, it helps cameras perform better.
James Campbell:
Everything in your facility ends up performing better from that, really. You just shine a light on it.
Ben Larue:
That's right. That's right. And so I guess that's actually a really good segue into the second place that we would turn to after physical barriers. So client comes in, they might offer that they have this problem, we'll have those conversations about physical barriers and then we'll immediately turn to hammers
James Campbell:
And we don't even sell physical barriers. So we're offering that advice as we think this is effective and everything like that. And sometimes physical barriers, like we said, they're not possible. They're not the end solution. They don't fix everything. You also need surveillance there to tell you what happened and try to get details for various reasons. You're talking, obviously you want the evidence, you want to be able to potentially bring that to police and everything, but even potentially more importantly, you want to be able to have insurance, you want this evidence for insurance, you might need to send that in to deal with your insurance. So I think cameras are invaluable for that. Just overall. And then I dunno, you want to add to that?
Ben Larue:
Yeah, definitely. I would just say without a doubt, cameras almost are like a must, especially if you have outside assets or assets that you cannot for whatever reason get inside of a building. I would say that too. Going back to that physical barrier type of discussion. If you can park the vehicle in a garage, do it. If that is not possible because we know many situations that's not, then having cameras is definitely important to cover those assets in the event something happens and nowadays, James, this better than anyone, these cameras have some pretty cool features on 'em, right?
James Campbell:
Yeah. They're getting smarter and I think one of the things people who when we're talking about this, they go, well, how are cameras going to help me outside of the obvious insurance evidence, everything like that. We've also got cameras now that have a feature called active deterrence. And so traditionally we think of cameras as being a little bit passive kind of surveillance and everything, but what these can do, you can set up our lookout mini 5.0 camera. This is a camera that features a got a blue and red strobe light on the top. It's got a speaker, it can yell out a warning message and instead of just sitting there passively recording, it actually will attempt to scare people away and to actually, that guy's about to go to the car and he starts hearing something with a blue and red light go off and he is, maybe he's going to leave it go to another place.
He sees there's cameras, he sees there's somebody watching 'em and all that kind of stuff. And that can be pretty effective in helping to deal with that. We've got other cameras that have just a white light that blinks and everything like that. And one last thing I'll add to him, but they all use, at least currently in our lineup as of September, 2023, they all have person and vehicle detection. So they're detecting more than just, Hey, is that a leaf? It's not going to go off all night when leaves are flying in front of it or if it's raining, it shouldn't really go off. So that prevents it from becoming something where they just know it's always on or whatever, and it's a fake thing we see at the grocery stores and stuff nowadays, but that's a huge effective thing. Yeah,
Ben Larue:
Definitely. No, those active deterrence, right? I mean, I know it sounds silly, but it is exactly what it sounds like They are designed to actively deter the incident that might be happening. And yeah, that's like sounding of the messages, like you said, the blue and white light on lookup, many other camera models with just regular full spectrum white lights. All of these can be added in this layering roach to helping deter and kind of be a little bit more proactive versus reactive
James Campbell:
With these
Ben Larue:
Situations, as proactive as we can be, as what we're trying to accomplish here with,
James Campbell:
You can even these days upload your own audio. It's great to have, Hey, you're in the warning area, please leave. That's all well and good, but if you're like, you record your own and upload it to there and you say, Hey, I know I see you in the parking lot and you make it a little bit more personal, that can be more effective. Which kind of I think leads to even our next thing, which is taking that active deterrence idea and bringing it to another level, which is our guarding, remote guarding service.
Ben Larue:
Definitely. And I think it's important before we cover what remote guarding is, going back to that conversation about physical barriers, one physical barrier that we didn't necessarily cover is that idea of a physical guard. You have a fleet of service vehicles for maybe you're an I S P provider and you get a fleet of service vehicles, you might actually hire somebody and pay them a salary to sit on site to ensure that this doesn't happen, right?
James Campbell:
Right. Yeah.
Ben Larue:
What we're going to be talking about here in a moment is our ability to offer a similar ask type service without having a physical guard on site. And that's what this remote guarding is actually speaking to.
James Campbell:
Exactly. Significantly lower cost than a traditional onsite guard. And so the way this service works is you need cameras of course, so you get your cameras that you've already got for general surveillance and maybe even you're using the accurate deterrence on it. But we set these up so that overnight when everyone's left the facility and everything like that, it's looking for those triggers still. So it's still looking for people, vehicles, and instead of just playing an automatic message and maybe giving you a notification, it's actually going to go to a professionally trained remote guard and the US and that guard is going to be able to sit there and watch what's going on. Is this somebody just simply going in and out of your parking lot to turn at night or is this somebody who's getting out of their car and starting to look at under cars and starting to do suspicious activity from there?
It doesn't just stop there. They're going to go ahead and give you the response is sort of customizable, but for many of our customers, they're setting it up to where they're dispatching police so they can get the police on the line, get them over there, tell 'em what's going on. They can also set up two-way audio. So again, they can give more descriptive warnings, I think, which is really important. So instead of a sort of generic call out, it's going to be, Hey, you over there in the blue shirt getting onto the car, stop what you're doing right now. The police are on their way. And then customizable too. We can do whatever you want really. You can call a local guard, you can call somebody who's next to the facility, you can call the police and then call the person next to the facility. It is really customizable, but the idea being that this service is going to take that active deterrence idea and bring it to a whole new level. You've got a human being police dispatch available and customizable response. Hopefully that's get it in a nutshell.
Ben Larue:
Heck yeah, I'd say so. Right. But yeah, I think what James is highlighting there is just really the ability to take what most people do assume cameras are, which is very reactive. If something has happened, now I go use the cameras to get that footage and turn it completely. On the flip side, we're now taking these cameras, eyes in the sky, so to speak, and making them extremely proactive, actually stopping and preventing the crime from happening in the first place. To James's point, it's just like I urge and remind people that it's a hundred percent customizable, and so we can custom tailor the response, talk down the actions after an incident is occurred and identified. All of that is totally customizable. And not to mention another feature or benefit of the professional guarding is the incident report that comes with following the actual incident happening. If you don't have the service and somebody steals a catalytic converter, you're the one or someone on your team, you're paying them hours to go sit and review footage, find the footage, document. This might take a day, sometimes several days. This is all time that is being accounted for and taken up where if you have a service like our remote guard, immediately after the incident, you're getting an incident report of the entire incident happening, documented that you could then immediately turn over to the police.
James Campbell:
Yeah, that's a great point. You really are talking, especially for stuff like this. You really want to be as quick as possible when it comes to getting that video that info everything to the police. And hopefully at that point, the remote guarding has already scared 'em away, which we've seen in the videos and everything like that where people literally run when they hear themselves being called out, and it is really effective because they are being watched. This has all been done in the shadows, it's all been done front of cameras that don't have any active deterrence, certainly don't have any remote guarding capability like we can do. And because of that, it's been, I want to say easy. It's been easy for people to steal cataly converters. That's why it's so popular. That's why it's exploding. It's an easy, high value target that it's difficult to capture on, difficult to stop. And I think remote guarding is probably the number one thing I'd recommend to people if losing Cadillac converters is going to affect your business, this is a really low cost. We're talking $85 or so a month per camera, which is what, three bucks a day? I think. So if you can get that latte in the morning, which they're like six bucks nowadays,
Ben Larue:
I know
James Campbell:
You can get the remote guarding on a camera and potentially save yourself headaches and heartaches when you have to deal with something like this. So
Ben Larue:
Definitely, definitely. Yeah. There's a saying that I've heard early on in my days in this space, and it's always stuck with me. Crime is not like lightning. It often does strike the same location twice. And that's the thing about Cadillac converter theft, at least in my experience, I've helped clients upgrade their camera to higher resolution and these different things to help try to subside some of this. And it wasn't until we got active return cameras or until we got remote guarding that we actually stopped it from happen.
James Campbell:
Yeah, I mean, that's an excellent point. And that's not like to scare you. It is statistically proven that if your target wants, you're on their list to go back, whether it's six days later or six months later. It's kind of a simple target there, and they keep logs of all this. Like I said, it is organized now. It's just not some dude in a rusty pickup truck doing it. It's usually pretty well organized at this point. So
Ben Larue:
Yeah, I mean we've, even to speak to that organization, we've even come to find that it's happening more in certain commercial environments because of the type of vehicles that are being used, and that type of vehicle has a more easily accessible, catalytic converter. And so even potentially doing research, maybe you don't have a fleet yet, but these are some of the things you are thinking about considering before you start purchasing those fleet vehicles. It could be something to look into.
James Campbell:
Absolutely. I think the last thing I'll put on for guarding and remote guarding as we call it, is I think one of the questions we'll get is, well, how does that compare to getting a notification on my phone? And I think the number one thing I usually ask is, are you going to be the one that picks up that notification at two 30 in the morning when it's somebody who's, again, it could be a threat. It could be somebody just driving around in your parking lot. There's nothing on the cameras, there's nothing really, and even, I don't know,
An AI and stuff like that yet that can really detect the difference between yes, that's a person, and yes, that's a threat in terms of looking at a catalog converter. There's nothing there that's going to automate that. That's where that remote, professionally trained garden is going to sit there and watch that and be like, yeah, that's somebody stealing converters all day. I'm going to get the police on the line right now and yell at this guy. So hopefully he stops. So notifications can be a tool for this, but I would hesitate to remember what you're taking on and what you're asking yourself to do. Again, 85 bucks a month is $3 a day. So I would take the peace of mind and get it for less than three bucks a day, to be honest.
Ben Larue:
No doubt. And yeah, if it wasn't stated earlier, I'll take the opportunity to state it. Now. We by no means are suggesting if you have eight cameras in the outside of your facility that you do guarding or remote guarding on all eight of those cameras. What we're suggesting is strategically picking and choosing the right cameras that are covering these areas where your vehicles might be parked is what our recommendation would be. There no need to get all eight cameras on the outside with chrome monitoring if it's not needed. Right.
James Campbell:
Yeah, that's an excellent point as well. And I think to that point, you can give us a call, we can talk you through these solutions too. Every single facility can have a different challenge. Some people are coming from the, we've heard it all right? Some people are coming from the woods, some people are coming from the down the road. Some people, there's a hiking trail going through their facility basically, and it can come from anywhere. And we've seen the gamut of different scenarios. So my advice would be, if you are experienced in this and you want to learn more about how you can protect yourself, get in touch with us, no obligation, free quotes, free information, ask us questions. What does this remote guarding service, can you tell me a little bit more about it, et cetera, and we'll be happy to get you on board with that and figure it out.
Ben Larue:
Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. I'd say it's better to have the conversation than it isn't. And yeah, I would just say speak to people who have experienced it before or speak to people who have experienced helping people who've gone through it before, and they'll be doing a lot of the same things you're hearing today. So definitely just appreciate all the insight. James, anything else that we can think of before?
James Campbell:
No, I think the only I'd wrap up with this is
Ben Larue:
What working from home is like.
James Campbell:
Yeah, sorry. Got
Ben Larue:
It.
James Campbell:
Yeah, exactly. I think actually that's a great point. Working from home has actually contributed to that a lot too. There's just less people out at office buildings that some facilities sometimes, and a facility that doesn't have anything going on at night is again, an extra target for it. So yeah, like you said, this isn't something that's going to go away. It is not something you can just kind of really ignore if you've got valuable equipment, if you got, and this valuable vehicles, et cetera, you need to start creating some plan to deal with it at some point. Because if it's not today, this, again, not to scare you or anything like that, but it is a real threat out there and the numbers just keep rising to levels that are mind boggling. So I'll put some stats here maybe.
Ben Larue:
Definitely, definitely. And I'll also just suggest that if you have a vehicle or an asset that is parked outside of Tinware, maybe you haven't checked in a while, just go check it.
James Campbell:
That's excellent point. Yeah, somebody of these ones are like, because your cameras are recording everything like that, and then they don't realize that this vehicle, the backup to the backup vehicle, they go to drive it. And Pat's missing and their footage was erased probably a month before it. So yeah, it's excellent point.
Ben Larue:
Definitely. No, definitely. Absolutely. So hopefully you enjoyed the first episode here of Problem versus Solution and excited to keep bringing some additional problems that we are seeing as prevalent in our space and then some solutions that we would recommend to help solve for that. And yeah, again, if you have any questions about any of the stuff that we talked about today or maybe just want to pick James or my brain a little bit more, feel free to call us. You can reach us at any of the contact information below down in the description. And also if there is a topic that you want to cover, let us know in the comments down below as well. We'd love to see what your all thoughts are on. But that's all for today. We'll let you get back to it. James, thanks again so much and we're looking forward to seeing you. Tune in the next episode. See.